Hospice Care Of Broward Finishes Expansion

February 1, 1988|By DON MELVIN, Staff Writer

It was a cool night outside, but a fire crackled in the fireplace of the large living room at Hospice Care of Broward County as executive director Susan Telli described how the room will be used to offer group counseling to families of terminally ill patients.

``We wanted to design the room so that families, when they came here, felt safe and comfortable -- and not in a sterile environment,`` she said.

The living room -- 32 feet long and 25 feet wide -- is part of a 2,000- square-foot expansion recently completed by the organization. Four new offices were also added.

The organization, at 309 SE 18 St. in Fort Lauderdale, cares for an average of 50 terminally ill patients at a time, all of them in their own homes. The organization offers patients and their families a range of nursing and counseling services, and its primary goals are to make sure the dying person is as free of pain and symptoms as possible.

The people the organization cares for are dying of such diseases as AIDS, cancer, lung or heart diseases, muscular dystrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig`s disease.